History is always great craic as there are many people who have their own version of it and swear their version is true, despite contraindicatory evidence. I told a story during a recent interview in relation to the false claims made by Catherine Corless and others that children were starved to death by the women who ran and managed the Tuam Children’s Home. My story was to contrast the true story of children who were killed off by medical doctors with the approval of their government.

I told the story thus: it started after a woman (and her husband) wrote a letter to the Prime Minister to have their profoundly disabled son killed off. The letter reached the Prime Minister himself, who decided to call in his personal doctor and ask his advice. The doctor agreed with the parents but told the Prime Minister that all disabled people were ‘useless eaters’ and should also be killed off.

I used the term Prime Minister to throw people off the scent until the punchline could be delivered. It was of course the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler. His doctor, in this story was Karl Brandt who was one of seven doctors executed for crimes against humanity, after they were found guilty at the Nuremburg trials. The ‘euthanasia’ programme was code named Aktion T4 named for the Chancellery offices that directed it from the Berlin address Tiergartenstrasse 4.

Well, the next day I received a message from a man telling me that the whole story was untrue, that I was not much of a historian and that I should not be trusting history written by Jewish authors and…

As to those convicted at Nuremberg, you as an historian SHOULD know that those trials were a travesty of justice. No German was ever allowed to refute any allegation to the ludicrous assertions made by the prosecutors.

[…]

Thus The Nuremberg Trials are no yardstick to judge any German by at that time. As an historian I would have thought you would know this but likely like most “historians” when it comes to World War 2, you have a blinkered approach and simply repeat what the victors of that terrible war say.

[…]

According to you Herr Hitler gave permission for such a program. Since you call yourself an historian and have therefore presumably thoroughly researched this incident, I have a few questions for you:

1. 1. What was the name of alleged woman?
   2. what form did her request to the said doctor take? Was it in letter form? If so, do you have verifiable proof of this letter’s existence and have you actually seen it’s [sic] contents?
   3. You say the doctor approached Adolf Hitler on this matter. All such meetings would have been meticulously recorded so on what date did this meeting take place? Was the suggestion about euthanasia made in writing? If so, do you have proof of it’s existence and have you actually seen it’s contents?
   4. Any official policy adopted by the NSDAP would have been meticulously recorded. On what date was the alleged decision made by Adolf Hitler himself to implement a program of euthanasia? Have you seen documented proof of this decision?

I am reminded of the old joke where the Japanese officer in charge of a POW camp authorised the British officers to select three men at random who would be freed in exchanged for Japanese POWs. Three men were selected by lottery, with the proviso that each man had to answer a single quiz question correctly but if he failed to answer correctly, he would be passed over and the chance would go to the next man in line. The first man up was an English man. The officer asked what was the name of a famous ship which sank in 1919. The Titanic Sir. Correct. The second man up was Scottish, and his question was, how many people died on the Titanic. 1,513 people died Sir. Correct. Next up was an Irish man. The officer asked him to name all those who died.

The Titanic is a good case in point as the number of people who died is an estimate, not the actual figure because it remains unknown. That’s history for you, all of the documents needed for total accuracy are seldom if ever available. So does that mean that the Titanic never sank, or that we can state that nobody died, or that the estimates are inaccurate! Even if all the documents were available there would still be a discussion surrounding their accuracy because all records contain mistakes.

I responded to my challenger sending him a copy of the letter of authorisation, signed by Hitler himself, written on official notepaper and dated 1 September 1939. Obviously, the text is in German but the letter itself is widely available on the internet along with a translation into several languages. I also gave him the name of the child, Gerhard Kretschmar. The name of his mother is quite obviously Frau Kretschmar, but I had anticipated that it would be not good enough for my intrepid challenger. It was of course a test of his ability and inclination as her first name, along with the name of his father is also widely available on the internet and is easily findable by anyone with the most basic of historical skills. That is indicative of a great problem with history, people can develop strong opinions and yet not be able to find basic evidence to support or disconfirm their opinions. Moreover, when such skills are lacking, people begin to make assumptions, just like Catherine Corless, so that when assumptions go unchallenged, a full-blown conspiracy theory appears and grows fatter with every retelling of the story.

So, can historians write off all the evidence presented at the Nuremburg Trials because some people regard it as a ‘travesty of justice’? Are the present-day memorials at the site of Tiergartenstraße 4 and elsewhere just figments of the imagination, particularly the Jewish imagination?

In my second reply, I sent my challenger a photo of the Aktion T4 monument in Berlin to which he responded with this comment about another memorial in Berlin, the Holocaust Memorial:

It is a grotesque collection of concrete blokes to do with the “holocaust” – an alleged event for which there is not one shred of actual evidence to prove any deliberate attempt was made by Germany to murder millions of Jews or homosexuals or gypsies.

If you are beginning to think this guy is a Neo Nazi, then I think his other comments would bolster this view.

Just to get you started Herr Hitler himself volunteered to fight in the trenches of WW1 in which he spent four years during which he was highly decorated on ma[n]y occasions for his bravery. Another little nugget would be for you to consider the number of peace attempts made by Herr Hitler in the 1930’s in an attempt to avoid war. Another might be the Bromberg massacres. I could go on but you get the idea I’m sure.

He is right here; Hitler was decorated during the first world war receiving the Iron Cross First Class and Second Class. The problem is that getting at the truth of Hitler’s story is made almost impossible by the popular view of him as the evilest man in history.

I have been to Germany many times and I have visited many historic sites including the House of the Wannsee Conference, now a museum commemorating the notorious Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942. It was at this meeting that the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ was coordinated and implemented. What struck me most, apart from the callousness of the individuals involved, who had no difficulty in advocating for the industrialised destruction of millions of human beings, was that of the fifteen people present, eight of them held academic doctorates. Academia has a lot of blood on its hands but has gotten away with it, at least as far as official history is concerned. Maybe it is because nowadays, it is the academics who write all the history.

The official history of both world wars is not a totally accurate account of the events which took place. Official history, that which appears in schoolbooks, is written by the victor and such histories are written as a justification and vindication of their actions combined with a vilification of the vanquished. Among the many problems with victorious histories is that they leave many unanswered questions, often defy logic and give off a whiff of dishonesty which leaves much room for suspicions to be germinated and grown. Suspicions themselves can create all sorts of alternative histories, ranging from plausible to the downright daft.

So as a historian my job is not to tell my audience how or what to think. I always advocate that when historians are writing for a general audience, they provide the available evidence, explain it as impartially as possible and let their audience make up their own mind.

Accordingly, I present some of the evidence here for the existence of the Aktion T4 programme which you can use alongside your own research to decide if it the programme ever existed. I will also leave the comments open at the bottom for you to present arguments for and against. However, the denial of the Holocaust is a no-go area and comments in support of such nonsense will be filtered out.

 

Aktion T4 – Evidence

The Lion of Münster

If anyone was killing children in Ireland, they would have gotten a belt of a Catholic crozier, just like Adolf Hitler. Clemens August Graf von Galen was the great man who stood up to Hitler. The Nazis planned on killing him after they had won the war.

Get the full story from these links…

The Lion of Münster: The Bishop Who Roared Against The Nazis

Clemens August Graf von Galen – The Angel Of Aktion T4

Amboss-Denkmal zum Gedenken an Clemens August Graf von Galen (story of the monuments pictured above in English)

 

The indictment against Karl Brandt and others from the Doctor’s Trials

9. Between September 1939 and April 1945 the defendants Karl Brandt, Blome, Brack, and Hoven unlawfully, wilfully, and knowingly committed War Crimes, as defined by Article II of Control Council Law No. 10, in that they were principals in, accessories to, abetted, took a consenting part in, and were connected with plan’s and enterprises involving the execution of the so-called “euthanasia” program of the German Reich in the course of which the defendants murdered hundreds of thousands of human beings, including nationals of German-occupied countries. This program involved the systematic and secret execution of the aged, insane, incurably ill, of deformed children, and other persons, by gas, lethal injections, and divers [diverse] means in nursing homes, hospitals, and asylums. Such persons were regarded as “useless eaters” and a burden to the German war machine. The relatives, of these victims were notified that they died from natural causes, such as heart failure. German doctors involved in the euthanasia program were also sent to the Eastern occupied countries to assist in the mass extermination of Jews.

Letter of Authorisation

Hitler authorises Bouhler and Dr Karl Brandt to start killing off disabled people. The document was written in October 1939 and backdated to the first of September, perhaps to cover Brandt who started his killings before he had legal cover from the Chancellor.

The picture of the document was taken at Nuremberg documentation centre museum. Written on Adolf Hitler’s personal stationery, it reads: “Reichsleiter Bouhler und Dr. med. Brandt sind unter Verantwortung beauftragt, die Befugnisse namentlich zu bestimmender Ärzte so zu erweitern, dass nach menschlichem Ermessen unheilbar Kranken bei kritischster Beurteilung ihres Krankheitszustandes der Gnadentod gewährt werden kann. – A. Hitler”

In English: “Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. med. Brandt are assigned the responsibility for expanding the powers of specific doctors so that, where according to human judgment patients are incurably ill, they may be granted euthanasia following a critical assessment of their state of illness. – A. Hitler

The handwritten comment reads: “Von Bouhler mir übergeben am 27.8.40 – Dr. Gürtner” (English: “given to me by Bouhler on 27.8. [August] [19]40; Dr. Gürtner”). Franz Gürtner was Minister for Justice (Reichsjustizminister) from 1932 to his death in 1941. Philipp Bouhler was an SS-Obergruppenführer and leader of Hitler’s Chancellery (Kanzlei des Führers; KdF).

BTW

The parents of Gerhard Kretschmar were named Lina and Richard.

 

 

1. Truth is the first casualty of war.
2. In war, all armies commit atrocities.
3. Beware of false flag operations.

These are the first three maxims of war upon which impartial investigation and recording of events are built. These maxims appear to be completely unknown to Irish journalists reporting on the war in Ukraine. Accordingly, their reporting is biased and is not allowing the public to view a true picture of events in Ukraine.

The country’s President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has become the darling of the western media and his view alone is presented as fact without any attempt to test his pronouncements for truthfulness. Zelenskyy is on a mission to secure military support in his country’s fight with vast Russian military machine and so has plenty of motivation to exaggerate and misreport events to horrify people in an effort to stir them into action. His claims along with those of Putin and all sides involved in the war should always be subjected critical analysis. No such analysis has been done in Ireland, and it took six long weeks into the war for the Irish Times to report the finding of evidence, which appeared to show Ukrainian military personnel committing war crimes. In comparison, the media were reporting daily about alleged Russian war crimes. The second maxim of war tells us that the Ukrainian army have been committing war crimes as well as the Russians.

All armies commit atrocities, and that includes the Irish army. Next March marks the centenary of the worst atrocity committed during the Civil War by the Free State Army. After midnight on the 6^th of March 1923, nine prisoners were tied to a landmine at Ballyseedy Cross two miles outside Tralee, Co. Kerry. The explosion left eight men dead, with one miraculous survivor who was blown by the blast across the road out of the sight of the Free State soldiers.

The American military killed 408 civilians who were taking refuge in an air-raid shelter in Baghdad during the first Gulf War. In July 1950, around 400 South Korean civilians were killed in the town of No Gun Ri by US forces from the 7th Cavalry Regiment. On the third of July 1998, the American military shot down an Airbus airliner, killing all 290 people on board. This is just a small sample, as the list of American atrocities is long and makes for difficult reading. It has been estimated that in all the wars involving the US military post-9/11, that 387,072 civilians have been killed (as of September 2021). The British, French, Spanish militaries also have a long list of war atrocities, as has every other army in the world.

It is a sad fact of war, that when combatants watch their comrades die or are militated, sometimes in horrific circumstances, they will seek revenge on people who they perceive to be their enemy. The recognition of this maxim means that well run armies can prevent the commission of atrocities by their service personnel, but they cannot be eliminated completely.

Sympathy brings support to your side, and having civilians attacked and killed will stir the emotions and hasten the supply of support. It has the added advantage of dehumanising the enemy as savages, demonising them for not playing by the rules of war, and making your fight seem like a fight between good and evil and justifying your actions, including your own atrocities. Accordingly, having your civilian population attacked and killed early in a conflict has become a highly important political and military strategy. On occasions, armies have attacked and killed their own people disguised as the enemy to ensure the blame for the atrocity sticks on them. However, such false flag operations do not always require such direct action. One popular device is to deceive the enemy into believing that civilian buildings are being used by the military, making them legitimate targets. Parking military vehicles around a hospital, for example, would give the impression that the building was being used as a military base. Leaving civilians in areas likely to be attacked or moving them into such areas is yet another false flag strategy. It comes with the added advantage that it would be hard to prove that it was done deliberately.

The fourth maxim is that ‘war is a dirty business’, and you can find yourself in just as much danger from your own side as from the enemy.

Ireland is normally neutral country, and this neutrality has served our military well in their various roles as peacekeepers over the decades. Neutrality is and was a prudent strategy for many reasons, not least of which is the country’s lack of military capability. It is astonishing, that within moments of a government commission concluding that Ireland did not have the military capability to defended itself, the Irish government dropped is neutral stance and sent military (non-lethal mar ya) aid to Ukraine. That is yet another sign of poor leadership, but also of how easily fooled populations are. Egging on war like it is a game of soccer will only increase the suffering of the people of Ukraine and prolong the war.

Advocating for peace and finding solutions to crisis can only be done by honest brokers trusted by both sides to be fair. Ireland has now removed itself from such an important political role and is acting like another tin pot state with military ambitions.

What if Ireland, last January, had counselled Volodymyr Zelenskyy to endorse a policy of neutrality rather than antagonise the Russians with moves to join a military alliance, which they consider hostile, would Europe be at war now?

Ironically, Ireland had to deal with its own separatist region post-independence and also the issue of enemy military bases located within the country. The politicians of previous generations, as history attests, were far smarter and more educated than the current lot. They solved the issue of military bases, not by joining a military alliance hostile to Britain, but by negotiation with the ‘old enemy’. Negotiation will happen in the future to solve the Ukrainian situation and the sooner that happens the less people will die.

One hundred years after the abomination which was the first world war, historians write of their amazement of how the political leaders of Europe sleepwalked into war. A war which could have been easily prevented, just like the current Ukrainian war. If we act as Zelenskyy urges us, we will sleepwalk into World War three. The only difference is that perhaps in one hundred years’ time, no one will be around to write about our sleepwalking politicians.

 

EJ

 

Refs

Irish Times: Video appears to show Ukrainian soldiers shooting Russian prisoner of war

Broadsheet.ie is a guttersnipe website which gives vent to a certain type of Irish prejudices and bias. There is no editorial control and so the contributors are free to express any kind of drivel so long as it supports a particular narrative.

Bodger, whose real name is John Ryan, is a fervent believer in anti-Catholic conspiracy theories and is therefore inclined to dispense with the normal standards of journalism and not bother to confirm if the information he writes is truthful. One of his posts labels me as a “Catholic activist” and states that I “applaud the findings of the Mother and Baby Home Commission of Investigation”.

John Ryan has not read a single word I have written, nor did he try and contact me to confirm if the allegations he was about publish were true.

In one article he mentions the names of two women as his source: Breda Murphy and Annette McKay. I know Breda Murphy; she is a lovely woman and is nice to the point of being gullible. Breda is a sucker for a sob story, especially if it supports her opinions, and is never one to think scientifically and seek out contradictory evidence. Annette McKay, on the other hand, I have never met but appears to have made a name for herself making all sorts of unsubstantiated allegations about mother and baby homes and the women who ran them.

Despite seven years of work, the examination of one million historical documents, the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes found that there was no evidence to support most of the allegations supported by Breda Murphy or Annette McKay. Evidence is not something these to care about and so have been up in arms trying to discredit the commission to save their embarrassment. Paradoxically, conspiracy theorists never need evidence to support their opinions, and when no supporting evidence is found, they imagine that the investigation must have been a conspiracy against them.

As I have stated before, and I have written in my book, the commission of investigation made significant errors, as they were not well-equipped to investigate medical matters. However, despite their many howlers, the commission could not find evidence of murder and abuse at mother and baby homes. Such charges relied on an incompetent interpretation of medical terms on death certificates. An issue on which I had written and was published three years before the commission’s final report became public.

However, without any fact checking, Annette McKay took to the tweet machine to laud her own intelligence and claim that I have to be told what to believe by the commission of investigation.

‘There was no physical abuse, there were no starving babies’ He claims that because the final report told him so. The damage caused by the misuse of our personal testimony allows these conspiracy theorists to thrive. — Annette Mckay (@AnnetteMckay15) August 9, 2021

There you have it, the commission were conspiracy theorists and so too are historians like me.

FYI, I was invited to speak at the children’s cemetery in Tuam as part of the filming of a documentary. There were bloggers present who broadcast the interview live on the Internet. The scandal promoters then spread copies of selected parts around through their various outlets. However they managed it, they left out the parts of the interview where I presented incontrovertible evidence which shows that their allegations are false. The truth, or indeed even an opposing opinion, cannot be allowed to reach the ear of reasonable people for fear of being found out.

The Tuam cemetery film was only a part of the documentary. There is much more to come.

Suggesting that I am “a Catholic activist” would have my friends ROTFL, for days on end!

The definition of a ‘Bodger’ is a creator of ‘worthless or second-rate’ items and so the Broadsheet writings of John Ryan certainly lives up to his moniker. However, sheet is what a Mexican exclaims when he hits his thumb with a hammer, and so broad sheet could easily be renamed muck-splatter.ie — guttersnipers at work. Read it but only if you want your prejudices titillated and your wobbly bits wobbled but look elsewhere for truth and quality journalism.

EJ

References.

https://www.broadsheet.ie/2021/08/09/denial-in-tuam/

John Ryan (publisher)

Lessons for Historians in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home Scandal by Eugene Jordan, Local History Review, 2018, Federation of Local History Societies.

 

Yet another carbuncle has been added to the corpus of Ireland’s mother and baby homes saga. In a recent judgement, the Irish High Court has ruled that a Circuit Court Judge, a Professor of Law and a Professor of history did not know the first thing about law and so ‘acted unlawfully’. I imagine the judgement will be met with some embarrassment by the three people who headed up the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes, a professor of history, but especially the two ‘distinguished’ lawyers.

Dr. William Duncan is a former Professor of law at Trinity College Dublin, a Member of the Law Reform Commission and Deputy Secretary General of The Hague Conference on Private International Law. His work with the latter organisation earned him a ‘Presidential Distinguished Service Award for the Irish Abroad’ in 2020. However, the quality of his discernible contributions contained within the final report of the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes, are not reflective of a high and mighty barrister, not to mind a professor of law.

Before her appointment as a circuit court judge, Ms Justice Yvonne Murphy practised at the Bar on the Northern Ireland and Dublin Circuits. She is a member of the Bar of England and Wales and of the Bar of Northern Ireland. She was appointed to head two previous investigations into sex abuse perpetrated by clergy, and was married to the late Supreme Court judge, Adrian Hardiman.

It is fair to say that both these people are highly respected by their legal colleagues and by the Irish political establishment, but their report contains a litany of basic errors ranging from mild to shockingly bad, mostly due to the commissioners’ lack of basic knowledge — let alone expertise — in the area they were tasked to investigate. Between them all, there is no evidence to suggest that they were in possession of even a jot of knowledge of aetiology, pathology, epidemiology or statistics, particularly mortality statistics, issues and practice.

Appointing people to a commission of investigation without the necessary skills to do a reasonably good job was not the responsibility of the commissioners. The blame for such ineptitude lies completely with the seven political dwarfs who instigated, presided over and acted on the findings of the commission, without expending a single microjoule of energy on brain power. They accepted the stereotypes, took no action which may have led them to formulate an informed opinion, and so allowed Ireland’s dishonest or delusional politicians and demagogues to have free rein on the floor of the houses of the Oireachtas. Many stepped forward to make entirely false allegations — not one allegation was supported by evidence — of women starving babies to death, both protestant and catholic. Their motivation — according to an absurd and quixotic claim by University College, Dublin Professor Diarmaid Ferriter — was ‘to get rid of an embarrassment to catholic Ireland’. A master of equivocation, with a reputation as an anti-Catholic, he was egging on people towards the belief that the Irish government had a secret eugenics agenda and so ‘colluded’ with others to rid the country of undesirable people, primarily, illegitimate children. The logical conclusion — which he was careful not to state directly — was that the government secretly contracted religious organisations to operate death camps for unwanted children. Ferriter’s comments are the emblematic of the foundation stone on which the entire scandal rests, the notion that women hated other women’s illegitimate children so much that they were prepared to take them into their care, in order to secretly kill them.

Even commissioners without the relevant skills to conduct a competent investigation into historical medicine and practice, could not find a single shred of evidence to support the ‘death camp’ allegations. The commission also did not find any evidence to support many of the lurid allegations of former residents. Therein lies the genesis of the high court action.

Two women who gave evidence to the commission felt that their stories were not accurately reflected in the commission’s final report. They claimed that they should have been given a draft copy of the report, in advance of it being sent to the Minister for Children. Accordingly, the High Court judgement of December 2021 ruled that the commission breached its statutory duty under section 34 of the Commissions of Investigation Act 2004, by failing to provide each of the applicants, who are identifiable in the report, with a draft before the final report was submitted to the Minister for Children.

The key element is outlined in bold above. The judgement was handed down despite the fact that all witness statements in the final report were written without using real names of many of the complainants. However, the two women claimed that they could be easily identified as their stories were already in the public domain. A point which the commissioners apparently did not anticipate and so were judged to have acted ‘unlawfully’. A ruling which would appear to be a tad severe given that it may be due to a genuine mistake. However, given the calibre of the lawyers involved, it is amazing how prone they were to make such a junior mistake.

There is no doubt that after seven years of investigation the commission was tired and very tired of listening to baloney from witnesses, activists, journalists and politicians and wanted out as soon as the final report was sent to government. They could not wait to dissolve the commission and refused to answer questions about their report to all and sundry including the government. I think they correctly anticipated that the Irish government and certain politicians are not willing to hear the truth. The truth would of course come as an embarrassment to a lot of people including the seven political dwarfs who all have questions to answer regarding hate speech, the promotion of lies and plain old-fashioned ignorance of history.

More on this subject anon.

EJ